Crafting Azeroth

For more recent updates, please read this post on the Minecraft forums.

Crafting Azeroth v1.0 includes over twice the content of the original beta version, including the new continents of Outland, Northrend and the Great Sea, as well as the original continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. Additionally, many zones that first appeared in the beta version have been re-generated using newly added blocks and features. To learn more about v1.0, you can view screenshots in the updated image gallery, read the included readme file, or explore the interactive map in your browser.

About this project:

The Crafting Azeroth project is a full-scale reproduction of the World of Warcraft environment for Minecraft. The creation of the map is heavily automated, assisted by custom software that I have developed. The best way to explore the map is inside Minecraft, but you can also view the map in your browser by clicking the link below:

Screenshots of the map can be seen in the galleries below, including all new screenshots of Outland and Northrend. If you are unfamiliar with World of Warcraft, the "Before and After" gallery will show comparison screenshots between World of Warcraft and Minecraft:

Additional information about the map and many older screenshots are available in this this archived post.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Q. How does the conversion process work?

A. Custom software converts the continents of World of Warcraft into Minecraft blocks using a process known as voxelization. This software converts everything in the game, including all the buildings and natural details, down to the individual tree stump. Once the parameters for the software have been set, the conversion process takes approximately 48 hours and requires no human intervention.

Prior to the conversion process, I needed to match textures from World of Warcraft to the appropriate material in Minecraft. For example, an object with a wooden texture might be converted into wooden planks, while an object with a mossy texture might be converted into mossy cobblestone. I created a special software tool to help perform this assignment, but selecting materials for all 10,000+ textures in the game still required many hours of work.

Q. How large is the world?

A. The current version of the map spans approximately 500 square kilometers and contains over 100 billion blocks. The highest part of the world, the peak of Mt. Hyjal, stands more than a kilometer above sea level. Since the map exceeds the Minecraft height limit, the world had to be divided into seven altitude layers, each connected via a server-side plugin that teleports players as they approach the height limit. To be played locally, the map requires 22 gigabytes of available hard-drive space.

A. Yes, work has already started on Pandaria, but it will take a bit more time before the zone is ready to be released. The conversion process can also be used on dungeons and battlegrounds, so they may appear at a later date, but they are not top priority right now.

Q. Where can I download a copy of the map?

A. The full map is available to download right now, just click the BitTorrent link at the top of this post. If you don't want to download, you can also explore a read-only version of the map by adding wow.cursecraft.com to your in-game server listing.

(new)Q. I downloaded the map, but now I'm stuck in Outland. What do I do?

A. Entering the Dark Portal in Hellfire Peninsula should return you to the Blasted Lands in Azeroth, just as it does in World of Warcraft. If the portal takes you to the Nether instead, you may not be using the correct plugins. Check the readme file for instructions on how to download and install a Bukkit server with the required plugins. The readme also lists some useful /tp commands for teleporting to key locations.

(new)Q. The game runs really slow when I'm near a jungle. How can I fix this?

A. There are two important things you can do. First, set your graphics in Minecraft to "fast", so that leaf blocks are opaque rather than transparent. Second, make sure that you are running the map on a Bukkit server with CA-Static-1.0 plugin correctly installed. Doing both of these things will greatly improve performance in large jungles and forests and should also help preserve the map from damage.

(new)Q. Can your software convert games other than WoW?

A. In principle, the same technique could be used on other games. In practice, it would be a tremendous amount of work, almost equal in difficulty to writing new software. The converter would need to be adapted to handle new file formats and a new data set, which is the majority of the "hard work" involved in the project. As a result, I have no plans to use the software to convert other games.

Q. Who is involved in this project?

A. All major software and documentation for this project was written by Rumsey (RamsesA), including the voxelization software used to generate the map and the related plugins included in the download. Hosting support for the Minecraft server is provided by Cursecraft, and in particular Martin Benjamins (Marlamin), who helps manage the server directly. The mapping software used to generate the Google Maps view of the project was provided by the Minecraft Overviewer team.

For a more detailed list of credits, please consult the readme file. Special thanks also goes to Alan J. Lee for offering to redirect the craftingazeroth.com domain to this page.

Q. Who can I contact if I have more questions?

A. In addition to posting here, you can contact me via email or Twitter, or send a private message through this website. If I do not respond right away, check if it's something covered in the readme or this FAQ.

I can understand why it might be too large due to height limitations, but I don't understand how it can be "too small" as ww stated.

Because when you are building with a cubic meter block, you won't get enough detail in a building for it to even look authentic at a 1:1 ratio. Or at least, it would be very hard to do such. Certain archetecture within the game would look rather shoddy when transferred into Minecraft.

Because when you are building with a cubic meter block, you won't get enough detail in a building for it to even look authentic at a 1:1 ratio. Or at least, it would be very hard to do such. Certain archetecture within the game would look rather shoddy when transferred into Minecraft.

I'm okay with that, part of the challenge is trying to create representative models using a very small number of blocks. If I have to take some artistic liberties to try to get it to work, then that's fine.

Because when you are building with a cubic meter block, you won't get enough detail in a building for it to even look authentic at a 1:1 ratio. Or at least, it would be very hard to do such. Certain archetecture within the game would look rather shoddy when transferred into Minecraft.

Some of the finer details (like the spikes so loved by the Horde) may have to be removed. But I think you can tell Orgrimmar without the spikes everywhere.

"Oh, who does my hair? You might have heard of my stylist. It's called the Void!"
"No matter how much you plead I will not sprout tentacles or turn into a giant eyeball. Well, I might. But not because you asked!"

Let me know if you need help extracting heightmaps from the adt files though, I'm working on a program to do it as we speak. There are some older tools that do this but they don't seem to be updated for WoW 4.x.

Let me know if you need help extracting heightmaps from the adt files though, I'm working on a program to do it as we speak. There are some older tools that do this but they don't seem to be updated for WoW 4.x.

It seems like there's work being done that's already done. Mjollna has already done this and we already have a basic terrain render of Azeroth in Minecraft on the Cursecraft server. Converting WoW heights to Minecraft heights however is almost impossible and some stuff will have to be made less high (Hyjal for example will only be on a small hill at most). As soon as both me and Dinnerbone have more time we will open up the server and let people get building.

You weren't kidding, I had to resize the second image using ImageMagick before I could even open it on this computer.

It's hard to tell that the map is actually 3D. I thought it was 2D until I looked at Vashj'ir and could see there were actual cliffs. I guess that's just the way the world looks at this scale. =p

I finished my script to import the adt files, I was able to generate a heightmap for Kalimdor (below). Even if it's a bit redundant I'm glad I did it because there are some things I'd like to do with the data (beyond Minecraft) that I'll now be able to do a lot more easily.

---------- Post added 2012-01-20 at 09:03 AM ----------

One of the ideas I've also had is to make Minecraft schematics for certain WMOs (e.g. giant trees) and then automatically place them in the world based on the WMO data in the adts. That would save a lot of time building trees in Ashenvale and Feralas, etc.

To followup on the idea of placing Minecraft schematics based on wmo locations, I'm wondering if I can actually convert in-place wmo files directly into Minecraft blocks. Any wmo that doesn't have an existing template would have one generated out of a bunch of wool blocks. The "shape" of the buildings and cliffs would be there, and players would only have to replace the materials on the surface.

The principle behind this is not that complicated, as long as I can convert wmo data into a list of triangles. For each Minecraft block I would check whether a triangle from the wmo intersects it, then fill it in. It may not generate a perfect representation, but it would save a lot of time I think.

Okay, yes... I can do that. My script now loads every wmo/m2 model for Kalimdor and correctly orients them in the world, so constructing the blocks from this will be a piece of cake. You can see the data set below (I apologize for the mediafire link, I can't find a better hosting service for this file):

Once this tool is finished, it will be able to recreate every rock, tree, and building in the game. It will even create complex underground cave systems. It should save a ton of time versus doing it all manually.

For materials, I'm thinking I will be able to specify certain materials based on their texture. For example, if I find a texture for tree bark, I will manually flag that material as "wood," and the tool will use the proper blocks in minecraft. I won't be able to flag everything this way, but it should take care of the obvious stuff like trees.

I'm now able to scale the data to arbitrary block sizes, and render it in pretty isometric goodness:

To deal with the height limit, I have three choices:

- Attempt to compress everything so it fits in 128 blocks high (very flat!)
- Divide the world into different regions, and never have a "single" continent like in WoW.
- Use some sort of height mod to increase the height limit.

I'm leaning towards the third option, even though the mods have problems. The fact is, the 128 block height limit is just too limiting, and Mojang should really make something like Cubic Chunks standard.

Fortunately, if I don't like it, I can just throw the world out and start over. That's the luxury of generating it all with a program =p